For the better part of a decade, companies of all sizes have been using Zapier to integrate all of their applications and services. Since forming in 2011, Zapier has grown to offer their customers more than 1,000 different connectors with other solutions. The tool has evolved from one that simply offered singular connections known as "Zaps" into a full-fledged workflow automation tool.

Zapier aims to help non-technical people connect apps and services they use. By using an "If This Then That" (IFTTT) structure, the platform lets customers build reasonably complex automations without knowing a single line of code. The solution won our Editors' Choice designation for being an excellent small business solution in its category.

The company recently announced one of their most significant integrations to date: their new MashApp connector. Zapier users will now be able to leverage the popular small business marketing app and add information from any of the user's other tools to save precious time on marketing processes.

MashApp is designed to consolidate all of the user's marketing channels and record that data onto a Google Calendar, letting them record campaigns and their results in a single place. This information can be used to determine what aspects of a marketing campaign are working and to make better business decisions. With this new connector, users will be able to leverage apps such as Facebook and MailChimp with the click of a button.

"Driving traffic and generating new leads often requires experimenting with many different marketing campaigns, but keeping track of each marketing activity and the results can be time-consuming and confusing," Matt Lusko, Partner Marketer at Zapier, wrote in a company blog post. "Now that MashApp integrates with Zapier and its 1,000+ apps, you can create Zaps to add information from any of your team's tools to your calendar, without wasting time on manual data entry." Zapier could not be immedietly reached for comment.

New Workflows

While Zapier users can create their own Zaps by using the company's documentation, the company offered 20 pre-made zaps along with the announcement. Unsurprisingly, most of these connectors are for apps most popular with Zapier's small to midsize business (SMB) demographic. Once users create their MashApp account, all they need they need to do is grant Zapier permissions and they're all set to connect their marketing campaigns.

Say you wanted to keep track of your Facebook marketing campaigns. With the MashApp connector, all a user would need to do is create a post on the organization's Facebook page and Zapier's engine will be triggered to create an entry for the post in MashApp. From there, all users in an organization can see the post in their calendar and track the post's performance. This process automation saves time and effort; no time is necessary working with MashApp or Facebook application program interfaces (APIs) to make this connection manually.

The connector can also be used to record e-commerce sales. A small business can, for example, set up a Zap so that it would keep track of their Shopify orders and automatically add them to MashApp as conversion goals. All e-commerce sales data is now automatically displayed on the team's Google calendar, saving businesses time and frustration.

For customers with more unique needs, Zapier offers custom Zap tools that are compatible with MashApp. Users can read the Zapier documentation and learn how to create their own Zaps with unique triggers and steps that suit their own needs. This, in effect, makes Mashapp compatible with any other app in Zapier's extraordinarily large set of offerings.

Future Developments

Now that Zapier's integrations number well into the four-figure mark, the platform continues to carve out a unique place for itself in the SMB software space. Its closest competitor in the space is IFTTT, which offers similar connectivity between apps. Zapier, however, focuses more on productivity apps

. IFTTT, while similar in nature, has had more of a shifting focus to Internet of Things (IoT) devices such as smart speakers.

As far as looking into what the future holds, Zapier keeps focusing on what they excel at: volume. Last month alone, the company announced integrations with marketing platform OnStrategy, the Zoho Writer word processor, and the sales automation tool Klenty. Zapier customers can actually request integration with any app not currently available. As long as the app they want has an API, the Zapier development team actively fields requests for new connectors.

About the Author

Rob Watts is PCMag's Business Analyst, writing reviews and features for a variety of business applications. He brings years of experience in editorial insights to the role, having previously worked as an editor for Keypoint Intelligence, an independent test laboratory for document imaging hardware and software. He spends his free time cooking and g... See Full Bio

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